STORRS — The last true freshman to start at quarterback for the UConn football team wound up setting just about every school passing record and played a rather large part in putting the Huskies on the Division I-A map. That quarterback was also a Connecticut native, Shelton's Dan Orlovsky.

When Orlovsky took over the starting job on Oct. 6, 2001, Tim Boyle was three days removed from celebrating his seventh birthday.

Now it's Boyle, a Middlefield resident, who is entrusted, for the time being, with helping to right a UConn ship that is listing so far from the Orlovsky days that the Huskies need to start bailing with blinding speed.

Orlovsky gained the starting job because former coach Randy Edsall had nowhere else to turn. Boyle has the starting job for Saturday's game against South Florida at Rentschler Field because the Huskies need to try something.

"I need to go out there and play to the best of my abilities," said Boyle, who turned 19 six days ago. "It's up to me now."

This move was in the works before Paul Pasqualoni was fired last week. Interim head coach T.J. Weist might eventually wind up with the credit for the move, but he discussed it with Pasqualoni and quarterbacks coach Shane Day before the Buffalo game.

Had the game in western New York not spiraled out of hand, Boyle might have replaced Chandler Whitmer. Instead, Pasqualoni decided to hold him out and give Boyle an entirely fresh start when the Huskies open American Athletic Conference play.

Then the hammer dropped. Weist had seen too much from Boyle — and not enough out of Whitmer — to abruptly change course.

"Tim's ready," Weist said. "He's responded well. He's shown the maturity we saw in him coming out of high school, and he's carried that here. Every day he knows he needs to get better. He knows he needs to get better in the next four days.

"He's shown a good grasp of things and what we want to do, but he still has to go through these next few days. We have to put him in some pressure situations and handle looks in practices because he hasn't seen that stuff before."

Orlovsky hadn't seen it, either. He won his first start, a 19-0 victory against Eastern Michigan, but then lost six straight to end the 2001 season and eight straight overall. After that, Orlovsky posted a 23-11 record as the starter and led the Huskies into their first bowl game.

Boyle's situation is far different. At 0-4, the Huskies are perilously close to posting three straight losing seasons for the first time since 1999-2001. Since going to the Fiesta Bowl after the 2010 season, UConn is 10-18.

Orlovsky took over a team trying to make its way at a higher level of football. Boyle takes over a team trying to claw its way back to where it was. And he's doing as the home-state kid anointed as the next to do what Orlovsky did.

Add in the fact that Weist likely wants the full-time gig, something that will happen if athletic director Warde Manuel sees enough victories at the end of the season. Orlovsky had almost no pressure on him. Not so for Boyle.

"I don't want to think of it as too different," Boyle said. "I don't have any specific standards for myself. I'm just going to go out there and play football, do what I know how to do and do what the coaches ask me to do.

"They expect me to be the starter they want me to be. They don't want me to be the inexperienced freshman. They want me to be an experienced senior who knows what he's doing out there, knows the game plan and is doing it well."

Ultimately, the coaching staff would have liked to redshirt Boyle. They wanted the 6-foot-4, 212-pounder to watch, mature and study. But they also wanted to see improvement from Whitmer. His propensity for mistakes that tended to outweigh the good things he did proved to be too much to bear.

For now, at least. Weist said there is no leash on Boyle, that the playbook won't be pared down to account for Boyle's inexperience. The job is his, an eye focused on the immediate future and not what is to come after that.

"My standpoint is the UConn football team wants to win and we want to win badly, and I think the coaches understand that," Boyle said. "The coaches are going to put the players in who they think will win games. If that's me as a freshman or Chandler as a redshirt junior, then that's going to be that.

"I'm not worried about that. My redshirt is my redshirt. I didn't come here to redshirt my freshman year, I came here to play. I'm happy with where I am right now but I'm not really worried about the fifth year. I'm ready for it."

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